Abstract

We study the impact of planned age at marriage on female education. We first develop a theoretical framework for jointly determining age at marriage and education. The framework hypothesises that due to a household division of labour that allocates relatively greater responsibility for housework on wives, parents discount their daughters’ schooling, with the discount increasing the earlier the planned age of marriage. We then test for this effect using household data from Nepal. We control for potential endogeneity by exploiting variations in cultural norms regarding dowry and differences in average age of female marriage among ethnicities and regions as instrumental variables. The econometric results validate our hypothesis that female education is negatively affected by cultural practices that favour early marriage.